: Nostalgia
Hi guys,
Just loved reading this. As they say............."The good old days."
For those of us who grew up during the 60s ~ early eighties in Middle Class India some of these would be ‘NOSTALGIA’
1. You were very proud of your first "Bellbottom" or your first "Maxi".
2. Phantom & Mandrake were your only true heroes. You can also nod your heads to names like Chandamama, Champak, Lot-Pot, Nandan. The brainy ones read "Competition Success Review".
3. You took pride in turning to the back page of your latest Amar Chitra Katha and ticking off yet another title. How many ever you ticked, you still had many to go.
4. Your "Camlin" geometry box & Flora pencil was your prized possession. The only "Holidays" you took were to go to your grandparents' or your cousins' houses.
5. Ice-cream meant - either an orange stick, a vanilla softy in a cone or at most - a Choco Bar if you lived in a swanky town.
6. Your first family car (and the only one) was a Fiat. Or an Ambassador.
7. The glass windows in the back seats used to get stuck at the two-thirds down level and used to irk you! The window went down only if your puny arm could manage the tacky rotary handle to pull it down. Locking the door was easy. You just whacked the other tacky, non-rotary handle downwards.
8. If your dad was the comfort loving kind, you had a magnificent small fan upfront, below which screwed to the board was the cassette player.
9. You went to "Jumbo or Kamla Circus" ; and held your breath while the pretty young thing in the glittery skirt did acrobatics, quite enjoyed the elephants hitting football, the motorcyclist vrooming in the "Mautka Gola" and it was politically okay to laugh your guts out at dwarfs hitting each other’s bottoms.
10. You have at least once heard "Hawa Mahal" & “Forces Request” on the radio.
11. If you had a TV, it was normal to expect the neighborhood to gather around to watch the Chitrahaar or the Sunday movie. If you didn't have a TV, you just went to a house that did.
12. Sometimes the owners of these TVs got very creative and got a bi or even a tri-coloured anti-glare screen which they attached with two side clips onto their Weston TVs. That confused the hell out of you!
13. You thought your Dad rocked because you got your own (the family's ; not your own!) colour TV when the Asian Games started. Everyone else got the same idea as well and ever since, no one came over to your house and you didn't go to anyone else's.
14. You dreaded the death of any political leader because of the mourning they would announce on the TV. After all how much "Shashtriya Sangeet" can a kid take? Salma Sultana also didn't smile during the mourning.
15. The only "Gadgets" in the house were the TV, the Fridge and the Mixie. All the gadgets had to be duly covered with a crochet covers and sometimes even with ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers.
16. Movies meant Amitabh Bachan. Before the start of the movie you always had to watch the obligatory “newsreel".
17. You thought you were so rocking because you knew almost all the songs of Abba and Boney M.
18. You had a turntable "stereo" and a collection of LP Records. Your hormones went crazy when you bought "Disco Deewane" by Naziya Hassan & Zoheb Hassan.
19. You couldn't contain your happiness when you suddenly had knowledge of Grammy awards and Tina Turner, Cyndi Lauper & OMG even Michael Jackson became familiar names.
20. School teachers, your parents and even your neighbors could whack you and it was all okay.
21. Photograph taking was a big thing. You were lucky if your family owned a camera. A reel of 36 exposures was valuable hence it justified the half hour preparation & "setting" & the "posing" for each picture. Therefore, you have at least one family picture where everyone is holding their breath and standing at attention!
22. Long train trips, with water stored in metal canteens, or earthen jars – bottled water was almost non-existent. Food was either packed from home, and shared with your ‘compartment mates’, whoever they might be. Additionally, each station had their own specialty food.
23. Dressing up for movies meant shoes, ‘long pants’ and a ‘bush’ shirt – and Hollywood in those days meant wholesome family entertainment like “the sound of music” and 'more wholesome' WW2 fare like “where eagles dare”... I bet both movies have been seen by all of us at least 3 times, that too in a theater.
24. Someone mentioned the mandatory news film reel – we also had the national anthem played at the end of every movie – the practice stopped sometime in the late 70s (?).
25. The closest we had to a reality show was Binaca geet mala on Radio Ceylon at 7.30(?) on Wednesday evenings – Distinctly remember when “om shanti om” from Karz made it to the top. A big part of the “radio Ceylon” experience was trying to get the antenna strung up just right, so that we had decent reception. No, the radio was not Dolby 7.1 surround sound.
26. Elections were fun, since DD showed movies 24x7 between quick and efficient election updates – no endless analysis and re-analysis of poll results by talking heads.
27. Tea breaks during Cricket matches had this quirky German (I forget the name) show that showed these fun games between towns.
28. Outside the Cinema, the only way to watch movies was the occasional B&W projector that magically appeared every once in a while at the neighborhood park or ground, and showed B&W Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand movie reruns.
29. Phantom sweet cigarettes – who can forget those? That was the way to look cool in school – walk around with these dangling from the side of your mouth with the meanest Clint Eastwoodish smile.
30. Phone numbers were 4 digits (at least where I lived as a child!), and easy to memorize.
31. You could play with anyone, anywhere and your parents didn’t mind, as long as you got home on time. (seeing middle class kids confined to their own society walls across housing societies across most of the country, is a bit disquieting).
